Mortality and beliefs

Recently one of our pet cats lost the use of her back legs all of a sudden. She was 18 years old. We paid a visit to the vet and, as we expected, there was no treatment that he could offer other than to put her to sleep.

The incident raised all kinds of thoughts and feelings.

Sooty was Katie’s (my younger daughter’s) pet. Katie came home so that she could be at the vets … to be able to say goodbye.

I so much wanted to be able to make things better.

The decision to allow the vet to inject the lethal dose of chemicals wasn’t easy to make … even in a situation when no kinder alternative seemed to exist.

She lays half paralysed

Yet able to warble in her own special way

At the touch of a hand or a whisper

Gentle caresses and words of comfort

As the needle delivers its payload

Ultimately helpless

We are all slaves of time

Events like this make me wonder about life and death.

Over the years my views on this have changed. From atheist to born again Christian to agnostic to I don’t really know.

Last weekend I was talking with a friend about how once life seemed to include a lot of black and white issues. Rights and wrongs. Whereas now there seem to be many shades of grey. Which reminds me of a song Where do we go from here? that was part of a Christian Musical called Lonesome Stone way back in the early 1970’s.

Last Christmas I read A new kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren at the recommendation of Dani. I was surprised by it … offering a possibility of some kind of a return to some kind of a belief when I’d thought that there had been no way back.

I’ve not made much progress on that front up to now, but I’m thinking about it still.

In moving from a position of atheism to being born again I was influenced heavily by Christians that I met at university who were connected with The Navigators. There was a great deal that was good about the experience.

More recently I’ve found the concept of belief in God to be a whole lot harder. The reasons for this are mixed. They include gender, sexuality and, I guess, rationalism.

As I’ve been able to accept and be happy with my own feelings of mixed gender I’ve not really revisited the beliefs that I once held.

And so … perhaps now I will.

There are a lot of different approaches that I could take.

For now I think it will be similar, in some ways, to the approach that was recommended to me back in the 1970’s … a look at the gospels in the New Testament of the Bible. Some of the things that Brian McLaren says in his book fit into this approach as well … he suggests that the way to understand the Bible is to start with Jesus … the Gospels … rather than attempting to understand Jesus and the Gospels by reading the rest of the Bible first.

But, there will also be significant differences.

I’ll be looking at it from a different angle … with a different set of life experiences and different expectations.

My views on gender and sexuality are different than they used to be. I know that will affect how I interpret and understand things.

In a way it will be a backslidden Tranny perspective on what it all says. And to some people maybe that makes the whole exercise futile and meaningless.

But as a backslidden Tranny I’m hoping that it will mean something to me.

I don’t know where it will lead me … closer or further away from a belief in God.

But it’s something I feel that I need to do.

If you’re reading this I’d value your comments, thoughts and feelings … from whatever perspective you make them … so please comment.

Tomorrow … or soon after … I’ll begin reading the gospel of Matthew.

Do you believe in sex?

The past week I’ve been working in Bristol, staying at the Premiere Inn at the Haymarket.

The train was on time, no snow and only a little rain.

A couple of nights ago I caught the tail end of a TV programme that featured two girls who were travelling around with parents and grandparents. Having missed the start of the show I’m not certain of the exact details. It seems, though, that the aim of the journey was to help the two girls decide if it was time for them to give up their virginity.

The UK, it appears, is a European leader in things such as teenage pregnancies, sex without condoms and youngest average age (for girls especially) to become non-virgins.

As they say … sometimes one thing leads to another.

The girls spent some time talking with 15 and 16 year old boys at a school. Expert advice indeed.

They said they wished that their mothers could be more open in talking about sex … in particular their own sexual experiences.

They visited Holland … which reputedly has a much more open attitude to sex than the UK. And also much lower rates of teenage pregnancy and a higher average age for loss of virginity.

They talked with a Dutch mother and her 16 year old daughter. The daughter had recently had her first full sexual encounter. Everyone was impressed with the  openness of the relationship between this girl and her mother.

At no point that I saw were the concepts of marriage and sex seen to be related in any way. Perhaps that idea had been discussed or dismissed earlier in the programme.

Soon after meeting the teenager and her mum they went on a walkabout through the red light district of Amsterdam accompanied by a brothel owner as well as the Television crew.

They saw ladies in shop windows … and the brothel owner explained a little about how the places work.

The reaction of the two British girls to this was one of disbelief. Shock. How could people? Isn’t sex all about love? They cuddled mum and cried and sobbed.

I’ve given this reaction some thought. It seems that they hadn’t yet discovered that the significance of sex can be very different to different people.

• A mechanism for procreation
• An expression of love
• A source of pleasure
• A thing to not talk about
• A source of shame
• A necessary evil
• Something that should only ever happen between married people
• Something to sell
• Something to buy

And many other things.

Not all of the above are applicable to all people.

In fact all of the above are applicable to no people.

It’s definitely a some opinions to some people kind of relationship.

And peoples opinions sometimes change.

Once upon a time in the distant past I remember one of those debating sessions in an English class. Pre-puberty, early secondary school.

I am a panel member.

Non-panel members get a chance to pose the debating questions.

Janet Taylor raises her hand.

“Do you believe in sex before marriage?”

Janet Taylor wears the shortest skirts in school. Even shorter than Andrea wears today.

Her legs go a long long way. Maybe she was already post-puberty.

It was, though, more of a question than an offer.

My turn arrives to express an opinion.

“I don’t believe in sex.”

As I said. Opinions change. Puberty does that to a person.

Eventually I came to believe in sex.

At age 18 I was born again. Sex still a belief rather than a practical experience. The belief restricted to the confines of marriage. There were definite rights and wrongs about it.

Today I’m not so sure about the rights and wrongs.

The reaction of the girls in the television programme seemed to be strangely inconsistent.

There are things that I wonder about …

• Maybe some cattle-market-like nightclub dance floors aren’t so different from the red light shop windows of Amsterdam. People seeking the same thing.
• Boys at nightclubs will sometimes invent all kinds of stories to impress girls. At times maybe this is about romance. At other times maybe it’s a lot more basic.
• Maybe a shop window in Amsterdam can be a more honest and safe way of people achieving the same ends without a need to tell lies to each other?

I think that the things that matter most between people include things such as:

• Honesty
• Respect
• Love … in the sense of wanting to help rather than to hurt each other

I guess that in reality love encompasses the honesty and respect.

It sounds a little like things that I heard at Church.

But at Church this was supplemented by an additional framework of rights and wrongs that mattered even more than honesty, respect and love.

These included big stuff like not killing people. Unless of course it’s in self defence, or a “just” war …

And other stuff as well:

• Do not be gay
• Do not be lesbian
• Do not dress in women’s clothing – unless, of course, you are a woman

And you can’t even do these things during a war or in self defence.

Mostly I’ve discarded lists of absolute don’ts.

It’s not that I think that everyone should do them. More that it “depends”.

Sex, like almost all other things, then just fits into an overall framework of honesty, respect and love.

Simple?

Well … maybe.

Easy?

Well … no. Not at all.

I think a lot of this begins with “oneself”.

I recall a Bob Dylan song … “Slow train coming”.

That’s how it’s been in my experience.

A lifetime to get to a place where I can be honest with myself and about about myself. A place where I respect myself. Even my unconventional dressing habits. My flirtations with pornography.  A place where I don’t feel I have to hide it all or live in fear of being found out. A place where I can love myself.

I know … this stuff is in the Bible as well. It says that you can’t love other people if you don’t love yourself.

A little while ago I spent some time talking with a girl that works as an escort. She is married. Has four children.

Her work involves sex. Her husband knows. Her family knows.

They are happy.

Is it wrong?

Whatever the girls in the TV programme feel about this, I have a feeling that it’s a lot less wrong than what happens every weekend at a lot of nightclubs.

Maybe not perfect.

But where is perfection?

Life journeys

The UK news recently has been full of the election of the new “speaker” in the House of Commons. John Bercow, the speaker elect, is apparently famous, or infamous, because of his political life journey … from extreme right wing Conservative to almost quitting to join the Labour party. It means that as a Conservative he seems to be extremely unpopular with the Conservative party who accuse the Labour party of manoeuvring to get him elected.

Somehow or other during my lunchtime stroll this triggered some thoughts about one of my own journeys in life.

As a mid-teenager I decided I was an atheist. Mostly at school I’d enjoyed scientific kind of subjects and, somewhat arrogantly and naively, decided that science and God were mutually exclusive concepts.

On 3rd March 1973 I gave my life to Christ. I remember the date because it has a lot of 3’s in it.

Over the past few years I’ve gone through the process of pretty much taking it back.

Why?

Back in 1973 I was influenced a lot by Christians that I met. They were people that had a purpose in life. They were nice people.

I went to church. Did some Bible Studies.

I remember reading about Christians that were so convinced about what they believed that they were willing to give up their lives for it.

And I began to believe the same things. Conventional, evangelical.

Though always, in some ways, a bit of a rebel.

My hair was long. I read different books than most. Liked different music. Larry Norman and Parchment being much more my kind of music than the Glorylanders.

Yet, at heart, I saw myself as being part of the Bible Believing community. Not fundamentalist, but evangelical. I hope not overly bigoted.

For many years.

So what changed?

All the way through those many years there was a sense of inconsistency and tension that I’ve mentioned a few times before.

The things that Christians don’t do that I couldn’t help doing.

Eventually that led to a kind of intellectual crisis as well.

Could I really continue to believe what I was believing?

How do you really reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament?

A God that seems to command genocide in the Promised Land?

A church that says it is ok to not keep the Sabbath holy … but you definitely had better be heterosexual.

Picking and choosing.

The realisation that suicide bombers also believe in things strongly enough to give up their lives for it.

I know there are differences, and it really isn’t so simple. There is a difference between giving up your life for something that you believe and taking lives for something that you believe.

But in the end, I can’t square it and it doesn’t really seem to add up.

The whole thing seems ambiguous.Confusing.

One of the few things that I am certain of is that fundamentalists … people who are convinced that they are right and that everyone that disagrees is wrong …  can be amongst the most dangerous of all people.

People need to be allowed to be themselves.

I know, there are limits. People cannot always be left to do just whatever they want.

But if a man wants to wear a frock … well … I admit to a certain amount of bias on this one.